. . . and on her head, a crown of seven stars

Music: The The: The 45s THE INTERIOR IS MERELY A FOLD, OR, THE CONSTRUCTION OF A HYSTERIC I watched with some eagerness The Runaway Bride: A Katie Couric Special on Tuesday night. Barring one very artful jab by Couric, however, the special was surprisingly (and perfectly) devoid of content; the "interview" was just as vacuous as Jennifer Wilbank's head. When asked how she came up with rape fantasy, Wilbanks responded (with rising intonation) that perhaps she had watched "too many cops and robbers movies?" Nearing the interview, when asked the proverbial question, "why?" Wilbanks opened her eyes even wider, pursed her lips, and in the most convincing tone warbled, "I don't know."

Couric could have been much more direct, and the decision not rehearse and ask questions about the homoerotic rape fantasy was symptomatic of many lawyers and scripted conditions. Why couldn't have Annie Lennox done this interview? It could have been so much more profound . . . consider if Couric had soulfully packaged the question like this:

Tell me... Why Why I may be mad I may be blind I may be viciously unkind But I can still read what you're thinking And I've heard it said too many times That you'd be better off Besides... Why can't you see this boat is sinking (This boat is sinking this boat is sinking) Let's go down to the water's edge And we can cast away those doubts Some things are better left unsaid But they still turn me inside out Turning inside out turning inside out Tell me... Why Tell me... Why

But the interview was devoid of any sense of a sinking ship; it was all about how this ship is damaged but getting its hull patched up at the psychiatric ship yard.

The problem is that neither Wilbanks nor Couric see that there really is no ship at all; after one stupid or inane stuttering after another, one would think Couric would have come to the conclusion she is speaking to a vessl of the popular imaginary. Everything Wilbanks did when she ran away, up until the interview, is scripted. The only moment when there was something akin to a core of agency is the very moment that Wilbank's ran, and perhaps when she let her perversions run their course.

Do we "own" our perversions? Perhaps this is the seat of agency after all: the only moment of genuine self-direction is when the unconscious core has its way.

Tell me... Why Tell me... Why This is the book I never read These are the words I never said This is the path I'll never tread These are the dreams I'll dream instead This is the joy that's seldom spread These are the tears... The tears we shed This is the fear This is the dread These are the contents of my head And these are the years that we have spent And this is what they represent And this is how I feel Do you know how I feel? 'Cause I don't think you know how I feel I don't think you know what I feel I don't think you know what I feel You don't know what I feel

Lennox is both right and wrong here. She's right that one's feelings are not subject to knowledge in the sense that they can be captured, possessed, and owned. Indeed, the protest sung at the end of Lennox's "Why" is the answer Wilbanks, in fact, gave: I am a discrete human being worthy of respect and entitled to my own feelings, but I’m not sure what those feelings are. Wilbanks also said, again and again, she didn't know what she felt, but whatever these feelings are, she's entitled to them . . . as soon as the partriarchs tell her what they are. From perversion back into the safety of hysterical neurosis.

As for jilted groom (can a groom be jilted?): let us just say that, if the television interview is any measure, these two were made for each other.

REISHARAMA

Fortunately for me, my object of affection is complicated. What happens in Carbondale stays in Carbondale, for the most part, but I'll tell ya that I toured the beautiful SIU campus, ate at some nice restaurants, had a pic nic in a pretty part, received a professional massage at a spa, and cooked for three, gorgeous ladies on Tuesday evening. Curious readers are encouraged to develop their own running narrative of my recent, whirlwind tour of Salukiland based on this photo gallery. A mix CD of the genre of music of choice will go to the most exciting, HOT narrative submitted by readers . . . .

CONDO-LICIOUS

I'll be contracting with a professional mover today to get all my crap to Austin. It appears the town home purchase is immanent, pending LSU does what they are supposed to do regarding my separation. All the requested repairs will be made by the owner or the complex, so this is good news. My monthly payment will be much lower than I expected since I'll be putting about five percent down. It appears that the movers will load on closing day (July 22nd), and I'll be driving with the cats to the new place a couple of days later. I'm excited and nervous, but also anxious to "get it over with." I'm a neurotic mess and insecure when it comes to picking up and re-planting my life. It will be months before I can think in a straight line and sleep peacefully.

flag day

Music: The Cure: Pornography My obsession with the surfaces of "pop" is admittedly a kind of avoidance behavior. Certainly there are a number of very real and disturbing cultural dynamics behind the Michael Jackson Fantasy Machine or the Runaway Bride's Bug-Eyed Psychosis Factory. Yet these dynamics are mundane, somehow easier to cope with. We should define mundane here not only in terms of bodies (how many are made miserable or dead), but also in terms of the degree of spectacle, or perhaps better, the "size of the stage."

Judith Butler's latest book Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence is a powerful call to conscience and a reminder of why I signed-on to be an academic in the first place. I have always been a fan of Butler, and found myself often defending her "jargon" while working as a grad student at the University of Minnesota. What I admire about Butler is also what I enjoy about Zizek: there is a willingness to "go there," directly, and confront the issues that need to be confronted on the bigger stage (not the biggest, though; that honor goes to Hardt and Negri, and I think their stage is so big that it evaporates into thin air at times). In this collection of essays Butler examines the way in which mourning is killed in the service of a vengeful state, with the events of September 11, 2001 at the center. Having immersed myself in the literature on mourning and trauma this past year, this book is timely (and could have saved me much time), and should be read instead of the well known Verso tracts by Baudrillard, Virilio, and Zizek. I'm slated to teach a course next year on "Rhetoric and Psychoanalysis," and I'll probably be assigning this text for a unit on "mourning."

What Butler is up to is also something I've been trying to think through for the past couple of years (principally for the new book project). I've been "thinking through" it because its, well, tough stuff to think about it, and minds much greater than mine have spent many more years getting to the place I'd like to be. Anyhoo, while for Butler the task is to mourn in a state open to the Other, to let the dead speak, I've been hung-up on the Derridian language of hospitality/hauntology (in which the task is not to mourn, but to dwell in a state of melancholia; it would seem Butler's mourning is Derrida's melancholia . . . same posture, different spin on concepts). In either case, the goal is an ethical posture of openness to the Other understood as simple (or radical, if you prefer) alterity (not the Lacanian Symbolic). In either case, the real pickle is judgment, a problem that I think rhetorical scholars are poised to work on quite fruitfully, if only the lot of them in older generations would stop resisting this pesky "post" label.

The ethical project of openness to alterity (a "negative theology of the subject," if you prefer) is one that Butler is helping to frame for our horrible "Darkside" Empire times (thanks for that George Lucas--it almost redeems your Jar-Jar racism). The work has to be done, not just on the page, but also in meat-space. . . (or in popular music which, I admit, I still hold out hope for . . . Matt Johnson's marvelous The The album, Mind Bomb, written around the time of the first "Gulf War," is a brilliant aesthetic intervention . . . "Armageddon Days are Here (Again)"-indeed!). And doing this work in real space-in my daily life and in how I interact with people is pretty tough. Hypocrisy is the greatest demon. But, if I'm going to start preaching hospitality in my work, I better work on being more hospitable when I'm driving on I-10, shouting obscenities at the evil alterities cutting me off.

Last night while at the lodge I was reminded of Butler's remark that the construction of a State of Vengeance could be seen plainly on the obituary page: an overly patriotic homage does less to honor the fallen soldier or deceased veteran than it does bolster the (imagined) phallic thrust of the Almighty Sovereign. During a ceremony in honor of Flag Day, a respected brother delivered a lovely history of heraldry in the formative years of the United States up until the statehood of Hawaii. It was a balanced and fair talk that seemed to acknowledge our past and present glory and sins. I "came up" in the Boy Scouts, and the talk about "Old Glory" was familiar faire. As a U.S. citizen, I am respectful of the flag-to the point of burning it, of course. I think the U.S. flag is mighty precisely because it can be burned; for this reason, when my goodly brother said the flag is only as powerful as we make it, I felt proud of the fraternity and the flag we pledge to every meeting.

But then, something weirder occurred (I'm not sure if this is "secret"-I doubt it): the brother asked the lights to be turned out. Another brother held the flag taught as a spotlight shined on it. Then, the brother delivering the speech turned his back on us and began speaking "as if" he were "Old Glory." He implored us to admire his folds (yes, he/it did), and then went into a sort of macho, seemingly signifyin' sort of self-aggrandizement. I remember the line "I am beautiful and arrogant." Our goodly flag went on to declare, in bravado starker than your most profane hip-hop gangster, how he boldly flew in foreign countries the U.S. helped to liberate. It ended with a claim to superiority and dominion over the earth because "Old Glory" flapped in the windless breezes of our moon.

I will never understand why patriotism is always yoked to arrogance and domination. Frankly, patriotism at the lodge last night started to sound like rape.

God bless Butler for helping to put a language to all of this. The older I get, the more I realize how deeply these pop culture perversities go.

But I couldn't bring myself to speak out at the lodge last night about the problems of this understanding of "our flag." I would be immediately misunderstood, labeled unpatriotic, and so on. God, us on the "Left" have a real challenge in "our times." At least we have each other, and that's enough to be grateful for, I guess. That's enough reason for teaching. That's enough reason to keep writing.

days of wine and boys

Music: De/Vision: Fantasyland

Monday marked a profound Oedipal moment scripted by none other than Walt Disney himself: Peter Pan was spared from his fate with the Evil Step Mother (his "brother" the boy who accused Jackson of molestation) and allowed to fly back to Neverland. Found not guilty by a jury of his fans peers, Jackson must now contend with the immense debt he has amassed defending his paraphillic desires.

In speaking casually to others about the resolution to this fascinating study of mass repression, I often encountered remarks like, "they didn't prove he was a pedophile" or "he lives in another reality than the rest of us." The latter recognition of multiple realities is both true and, of course, ideologically motivated: were Jackson devoid of phallic attribution, were he a woman, he would have been convicted. Perhaps the most cunning aspect of his defense is his characterization as a "boy trapped in a man's body," a hallmark of emasculation without castration. Indeed, it was the threat of the castrating mother, the "hysteric" on the stand who chided the jury, that seems to have spared the King of Pop. Michael Jackson is a paraphillic obessional neurotic par excellence!. In (hyper)reality, neurotics win over hysterics most of the time (unless, of course, the neurotic is a woman, like Cruella Deville or Maleficent).

Of course, I think it's entirely possible Wacko Jacko didn't jack this particular young man, and perhaps he is justifiably innocent of the legal charges against him in this particular case. We do know, however, that he evinces all the hallmarks of paraphilia or sexual perversion: Jackson harbors fantasies that involve nonhuman sexual objects (e.g., strange fashions) and non-consenting partners (e.g., 12 year old boys). It has been argued his strange and weird attachments to objects and children in the popular imaginary was a calculated move; but why? Perhaps to create the situation of the third hallmark of sexual perversion: humiliation. Indeed, one need only look at Jackson's catalog since the mid-1990s to discover being punished, humiliated, and persecuted by "the mass media" or wicked lady-lovers is a favorite fantasy.

Recently Court TV aired a "documentary" titled The Mind of Michael Jackson that I watched while holed-up in the Austin Motel ("so close yet so far out!"). The show fairly convincingly demonstrates how Jackson's profile fits, almost exactly, that of a pedophile (hard childhood; strong identification with young boys; urges to give young boys the love that he never received; abusive childhood; creating conditions to lure children; and so on). I found the opening sequence perhaps the most disturbing: a image of Jackson's white washed face is shown, and then slowly the eyes cross, the nose moves to the left, the mouth travels toward the eyes, all to a creepy, calliope-esque soundtrack. It is a fitting visual representative anecdote of the damage the show causes to Jackson's "public image."

But I suppose that is just it: Jackson has no private world, it's almost entirely surface and public. The more deeply he embeds himself in his fantasyland ranch, the more public his paraphillic impulses become. Does he live, as many defenders claim, in his "own reality?" Is it possible that sleeping with boys did not involve sexual encounter? Yes, it is possible. But not probable. If Jackson was not a pedophile in the early 1990s, he certainly has become one since.

Jackson's "reality" is the one that we-the neurons and gaze-points of the popular imaginary--helped to create; we give the freakish their own world, as both a gift and prison. We don't have to tempt the impossible to satiate our own secret paraphillic desire: Michael Jackson, like Marilyn Mason, can do it for us. It's kind of like the Laff Box, a contraption that generates canned laughter for sit-com programs. Many people think canned laughter is designed to get the home-viewer to laugh as a kind of stimulus. But this is not how the Laff Box really works, nor is this its function. As Zizek argues somewhere (I think in The Sublime Object of Ideology), the Laff Box is designed to laugh for the viewer, so that the viewer does not have to labor.

Michael Jackson, like the Priesthood, functions similarly.

from green donkey dicks to elephant trunks

Music: mind.in.a.box: dreamweb The news is positive this Sunday afternoon: I have almost purchased a townhome in Austin, Texas pending the inspection on Monday. If the inspection goes well (viz., if they don't tell me to run, screaming), then I should be closing on the place mid-June. It is a 1400 square foot two-story thing in an area called "Old Towne," about six miles northeast of the University of Texas campus. I'd rather be living more due east or in the south Austin area, but I regret those areas were just too expensive.

The photo above is not my townhome, but rather, an "art project" in Houston one block from my pal Macy's apartment. This "vortex like" hole (their description) extends from the front of the house facing Montrose street all the way to the end of the house on the other side (yes, you can crawl through it; here is a photograph of megetting shat out of the house-gives new meaning to the evil spirit voice in the Amityville Horror: "get out of my house!"). This home is not too terribly different from a number of those we saw in my price range (viz., "shit holes" going for $130,000).

My place is more modest and less anal, although the previous owner Gloria is quite retentive. She wanted us to take off our shoes (I did not). My new colleague Loril Gossett and I toured the home and took photos last Friday, and Gloria made sure to detail every single upgrade she made in her twenty years of residence. The place is quite clean, although it reeks of mothballs. Gloria was very proud of her "reverse osmosis" water filter and sediment stirring hot water heater. Gloria also likes elephants. She likes them a lot. Indeed, she likes them so much that a lot of the wallpaper she put up has elephants on it, like the ones in this bathroom shot.

The place sits on a hill near a creek and right outside the complex pool area. The rear has a lovely concrete garden and patio (note: many of Gloria's flowers are fake), and covered parking. Downstairs is a large living room, two dining areas, and a galley kitchen. There is a corner fireplace (again, Gloria was quite proud of it!), and some built-in bookshelves. After the extensive tour (see the rest of the photos here), Gloria took me to meet three sets of neighbors. They all seemed quite friendly, and one couple had a great sense of humor (teasing they had loud and obnoxious parties all the time). I learned on one side of me lived two college students, and on the other, "Ms. Kay," an 80-something who was quite proud of her rather large kitchenette and "front yard" (her front yard, incidentally, is mine also).

I worry about Ms. Kay, because I'm a noisy neighbor. Oh, what to do? I guess headphones for the next three years . . . .

more green donkey dicks

Music: whirr of dryer tubling I got a counter offer yesterday for choice number three (they want two thousand more), which I can do. I may be able to land this one townhome: it's a good investment, although I'm not thrilled about the space.

Last night Jeanne and I looked at another townhome in the same complex as my second choice. It looked great, had a nice front view, tiled floors downstairs and a lot of improvements (including new AC and water heater). We made an offer this morning at 8:30 a.m. on that. Unfortuantely, they're also getting an offer from another couple. Because I cannot close until July 20th or so, they may get it if they can close next week.

But, as for choice three (northwest Austin), we may have a bird in hand. I should know more in a couple of hours. Buying crap is stressful

austin real estate sucks big green donkey dicks

Music: the whirr of Rachel's home computer. Well, I'm on my third day in Austin, hunting a home to purchase. I regret it's not going as well as I hoped. The first night here I stayed at The Austin Motel, a South Congress landmark. This place was way funky in that cool way, and in that oh-so-gross way. I have to admit I had flashbacks of Huey's New State Capitol Building while staying there (if you take a look at their famous street-sign, you'll get it . . . huh huh huh, huh huh huh). Second night, a lovely evening at Chez Barry. Rod Hart is a real trip at dinner parties (note to self: feed Rod scotch). Had a great chat with Dana on rhetoric and dialectic while my mouth was on fire from Barry's hot pepper texas cornbread. Last night, tonight, and tomorrow night I'll be chillin' with my girl Rachel, a junior faculty person whom I'm just starting to get to know. I swear, she is the most friendly person I've met on the faculty; you look up the word "friendly" in the dictionary, and it will say "see Rachel Smith." Read up about her here.

My realtor is a real hoot: Jeanne White. She's a good conversationalist and plays mother's role well (this is her role for me, see! Den Mother's always make good realtors for young single white guys with no money).

After two days of searching and driving around endlessly (and after two days of one depressing, filthy shack after the next), I decided on three townhomes: my top pick was the one I posted about in the blog recently. We saw it this morning, and let me say, the photos show its best side. The place outside is, well, a dump. It needs many repairs. But it is in an excellent part of town, and values are continuing to climb. Alas, the place was already in a bidding war that was far above the fair offer I made (120,000).

Choice two was a huge condo in a sort of retirement/older folks area. Immaculately clean and well maintained. Not the best drive to campus, but doable. Alas, I was outbid by a buyer who paid cash.

Offer three went out to my third and least favorite choice: a townhome in the northwest area. Yuppie-ville, basically. It's tolerable, but hard to get excited about (even so, better than the rentals I saw yesterday and today in my price range; god people will live in some gross shit for $1000 a month!). It's smaller than I would have hoped for, and clearly decked out in a feminine style. Not that I'm not down with feminine style, but rather, violet colored walls and frilly wallpaper.

I'm losing my optimism quickly, I'm afraid.

I hoped to be headed home tomorrow from Austin knowing where I'm living; day five of my trip and I'm insecure and clueless. Hopefully, I'll be home by Sunday packing boxes, worrying, but with the destination known. I think this sort of thing is much easier with a spouse/partner . . . you can use them for a sense of stability. Right now, it's "Live, Without a Net!"

Photos of the gross stuff I saw, perhaps, upon my return. I have seen some real doosies.

the last class

Music: Visage: "Love Glove (extended razormaid mix)" My last class at LSU was yesterday. The good bunch of folks who suffered through it are to the left. Click the image for a gallery documenting our "ethnography" project at the Red Star.

Today I was at LSU trying to move some offfice stuff out and into my car, but ran into all sorts of problems I will not go into (assholes locked our parking lot, but ONLY our parking lot). I will miss students like this, and my colleagues. I will not miss the incompetence of how the university is run, nor will I ever miss the smell of mold, urine, and urinal candies that greeted my nose every time I walked in Coates hall. I could hardly bear the smell of all that banker urine trying to lug boxes today.

Bankers were in our building at "Banker Grad School," some sort of seminar that runs co-currently with Intersession. Bloated fuckers need to flush the commode and wash their hands after peeing, I tell you. No wonder money is called "dirty."

Speaking of urine, has anyone read BIRDPARTY latey?

Now, I'm off to Austin to hunt for homes. Back in a week with updates and more inane ramblings. Hopefully less cranky ramblings, at least.

memorial day: reznor is a weenie, but gets some points

Music: Love and Rockets: Love and Rockets I know this is unfashionable, but Andy Rooney's editorial on Memorial Day totally rocked. I love that old grumpy guy. I regret I fall prey to CBS sentimentality every now and again (but never ever ever Touched by an Angel.

Speaking of CBS: Viacom, (who owns MTV as well as CBS and a litany of other stations) partly controls the illusion of choice. I was surprised to learn, then, that executives at MTV "expressed discomfort" with Reznor's plan to play "The Hand That Feeds" (a critique of U.S. imperialism in the middle east) in front of an image of George W. Bush. Apparently, after MTV expressed their concern Reznor pulled out of his band's appearance at MTV's "Movie Awards" program. Regardless, not two hours ago I saw a commercial on MTV advertising NIN's appearance on the show.

A brief aside: Reznor's new buffness annoys me. I recall, fondly, picking Jay Hamm up for school in my pearl-colored Volkswagen beetle at the age of 17, and I had a "Die Yuppie Scum" bumper sticker. I remember it was a cold morning in January and the engine had not heated up well enough. "Dude, this shit rocks," Jay said, and he crammed NIN's Pretty Hate Machine into the tape player (CDs were just catching hold). On the ride to school I fell in love with NIN, feeling every adolescent thought on that album deeply-that Reznor was my brother. I remember (with some fondness and some guilty) taking someone's virginity to that soundtrack. Pretty Hate Machine is not the best album, but I cannot hear it without hearing me-at 17. Us skinny suburban white boys who were not athletically inclined and sort of dug wearing eyeliner and skirts ate it up. And Reznor was "like us." Now he's all beefcake and shit. Eww. And his music is, well, progressively beefy like that too. Homology: it's pernicious, no?

Ok, so, enough of the nostalgia. Anyway, I'm surprised that Viacom and MTV balked at the apparent political polemic of "The Hand that Feeds." Really. Marketing choice is owning BET as well as SHOWTIME and CBS. What's wrong with airing something Lefty? It's still an illusion statements can be made; you'd think MTV would be all over it.

With Teeth is not a great album. Reznor is a one trick pony, and I think he finally played it to death with The Fragile. He really needs to do something unpredictable and less safe (track eight on the new album tempts it-it's quite gay and 80s and totally the sort of thing he needs to let loose on). The album has grown on me, admittedly, but his lyrics really CRY for sophistication. I'm not 17 anymore (neither is he, though his recent recourse to the bench press makes me wonder). Nevertheless, the decision to "pull out" of this gig is perhaps the best political statement he could have made. It's certainly much better than going through with the gig; had that happened, it's just another flavor among Vicom's roll of lifesavers.

Impossible Objects of Desire, Just Out of Reach

Music: Red Hot Chili Peppers: By the Way As the Memorial Day weekend approaches, by mind fragments: there is a stack of papers to grade; an essay to be drafted; another essay to be revised; and a home to pack. Last night had a few drinkies at the Red Star with my pop music class and the usual suspects.

I've also been thinking a lot about love.

AGAINST THE REPRESSIVE HYPOTHESIS

My colleague, friend, and teacher Chris Lundberg has been encouraging me to read Seminar XX: Encore, which Lacan gave in the early seventies. The discourse there is about feminine sexuality (sexuation or how you and I come to be differentiated in respect to certain biological characteristics) and love, among other things. Admittedly, I rarely read Lacan without some kind of companion, and yesterday, I was reading it up against SIC 1, a volume Zizek's clique put together on the concept of the voice and gaze as love objects (the dreaded objet petit a). The opening essay on the voice as a love object by Mladen Dolar is fantastic (and funds my current writing on music with Tracy Shaffer), but it's Renata Salecl's essay, "I Can't Love You Unless I Give You Up" that really has a nice pay off: previous to reading its analysis of The Age of Innocence, I never quite understood what Lacan meant by the ethical act.

If Lacan's definition of love is that "the subject gives to the other what he or she does not have," and if this object is, of course, the objet a, that impossible, absent cause that sets the whole romance machine in motion, then romantic love is fundamentally a shell game. Salecl shows how, in The Age of Innocence, Newland's love for Ellen is understood as something that is pent up and repressed by Victorian propriety. It is the anticipation of unleashing this desire-something that I tend to refer to as the apocalyptic, the moment before orgasm in one sense-that drives Newland to fantasize continuously. Ellen knows better, and throughout keeps telling Newland what Bryan Ferry told us in the early eighties: "(There's nothing) more than this." In other words, the Love is in the ritual of thinking there is more love behind the ritual to be released. The point is that the love is in the ritual itself; there is no pent up love behind the speech of freedom and escape. There is, as it were, no cum shot in Romance. It's waiting for that which will never arrive.

SORRY MARY JO, BUT, MY TONSIL HAS NOT GROWN BACK

Went to the goodly doctor on Wednesday to follow-up on my psychic's diagnosis, that one of my tonsils has grown back. After my doctor laughed for some time when I told here why I had come for a check-up, she peered into my mouth with a large wooden tongue depressor. "Ummm," she said mockingly. "Ahh," she teased. She then delivered the news: everything is perfectly symmetrical and she did not see any tonsils.

CONDOLICIOUS

I've been working with a real estate agent and a mortgage loan officer, trying to square away the details for purchasing a home in Austin. I would prefer, of course, a small bungalow a short distance to the university. Unfortunately, the Austin market is so ridiculously overpriced that I cannot afford any such thing. Homes in so called up-and-coming but "sketchy" neighborhoods to the east start at $150,000 and go up (anything that I liked was over $200,000). Recently I consolidated some debt at a lower interested rate with a loan from my bank, which apparently too negatively affected my ratios. To qualify for something livable, I may have to dip into retirement.

Not happy news.

I think Austin is a dangerous market and I'm getting quite nervous about purchasing a home there. Almost everyone has told me it is foolish to rent. The rent for a place comparable to what I have now (two bedrooms, approximately 1000 square feet) is over a thousand a month, which is more than a mortgage payment. So it simply makes much more sense to buy, build equity, get the tax write-off, and then sell in a few years when I have paid down some debt. That's my plan, any way.

So I've been looking at online MLS listings. My goodness, this market moves quickly. I would prefer a town home to an apartment condo because I'm such a noisy neighbor with my music, which is on continuously. Because the prediction is that the real estate bubble is about to pop in Austin, I have been focusing only on trendy and hot areas in the city, which is "south" near the South Congress area and East, near the old airport. Most of the places that I can afford are pretty depressing to look at, so I get discouraged every now and again.

A few days ago, however, I found a listing for a place that would be perfect for all my crap and me. It's in the south area, and apparently has been remodeled by an architect owner. Whatever. It has a lovely arrangement, with a living room that opens to a dining area, a fireplace, and a window into the kitchen (why all these condos in Austin have fireplaces is simply baffling). The dining area opens to an outside patio and a backyard. Aside from the décor (which is my style), the backyard is what really gets me excited; one of the things that depressed me most about thinking about buying a condo was not having a yard, however small, in which to plant things. So this condo hit the number one coveted spot on my imaginary list. It also has a loft, which would be perfect for the DJ rig and the home office. Kitchen looks nice, but is a bit too tiny. Bedroom has a balcony that overlooks another side of the complex. This condo debuted at $129,000, something I probably could never qualify for (though I am assured there are tricks for first time home buyers), but last night they bumped the price to $139,000. That's right. In Austin, a condo with 1,100 square feet with a backyard costs more than a home in most other places. Well, we shall see. I head to Austin in a little over a week to home hunt.

OPERATION DESERT FUCK-UP

I keep getting emails from "Ramona" that details "Jim's" adventures in Iraq. I don't know these people, but I'm afraid to tell Ramona I'm not the Gunn she is looking for. Apparently Jim is a medic. Jim's letters are pretty boring, for the most part, but you can tell he is ready to get out of there. Here's a snippet of the kinds of things Jim writes about:

April 1st we hit 104?. It was a red flag day by 10:00 and black flag by 12:30. Since then it has been much milder with temps in the high 80s to mid 90s. Hit 100 again yesterday (13 APR).

There has been an increase in the 671 grain diplomacy (don't mess with us or we'll shoot), which tends to increase the business.

We've been able to get a few holes of golf in at our make-shift course. It certainly helps break up the monotony of the day.

Joe's garden is coming in nicely. He spends a good part of his down time working on the terracing and irrigation system.

I had a big birthday celebration. The surf and turf was again the highlight. I was looking forward to a root beer float, but unfortunately, they ran out of vanilla ice cream. I received all of the birthday packages the items were greatly appreciated. Movie night, yesterday, consisted of The Incredibles and ZAPP's potato chips. The fig cookies have also been a big hit.

There's a lot to be said for the monotony of Jim's letters, but I'll let that go for now. I need to prepare for class today, which introduces the eager undergrads to queer theory and the politics of drag. We'll be watching Velvet Goldmine or Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I haven't decided, as well as a music video from the immortal hair band, Poison. One of my favorite lectures of the class.

My Tonsil Has Grown Back

Music: VHS or Beta: Night On Fire Julius and Amy gave me a fitting gift to thank me for marrying them in March: a sitting with locally renowned psychic, Mary Jo McCabe. Her new book, Cracking the Coconut Code is apparently doing well. I don't know what the coconut code is, but I suspect DaVinci is behind it. In any event, one reader at amazon.com's website urges potential buyers to "dig into this book and reap the blessings." That marvelous mixed metaphor aptly describes my experience, which you can listen to by clicking some hyperlinks provided below.

In any event, for innocent reader who stumbles on my website, let me offer a brief tutorial in psychic-delia: psychics really do not talk to spirits, although they may believe that they do. They use something called the "intuition," which is usually an unconscious ability to sense things about another person from their body language. Psychic have practiced using this ability so much that is more conscious. In fact, communication scholars have a name for the practice of reading other people: active listening. Last year I wrote about this more extensively. Here's what I said about active listening ("cold reading" in the argot of psychics):

In a cold reading the psychic performs "active listening," a technique of interaction that has become the staple of most courses in interpersonal communication: (1) one listens both to cognitive and bodily information; (2) one paraphrases what s/he hears; (3) one listens for confirmation; and then (4) one asks follow-up questions. Because the West is a low context culture (stressing the content of messages above other information), listening to bodily or relational messages is a hard skill to develop. Psychics, however, are experts at reading the body and paraphrasing that information verbally to the Other. Hence, cold reading is a kind of active listening that uses the content or verbal information of an individual to confirm bodily and relational information. Cold reading is a careful (if not sneaky) solicitation of information from a person, which is then fed back to her in a novel reformulation. The solicitation of cold reading is termed "fishing." Cold readers typically speak very fast while fishing until the participant affirms something (in recounting his first show, Edward remembers a woman in the gallery who raised her hand: "'Can you start over?' she asked. 'You talk way too fast'"). When there is affirmation, it is called a "hit." Gradually, by carefully phrasing interrogatives as statements of fact, the psychic can get very specific information from a person or "mark." Further, like reading a horoscope, the person being "read" tends to embellish enthymematically the partial and vague statements of the psychic, sometimes making even the most ludicrous observation fit past life events.

So, I went to McCabe's small office off of Bluebonnet, near the Mall of Louisiana. It was a nice office, well cleaned, and copies of her books littered the waiting room. I sat with the secretary in the front office for about fifteen minutes while I waited for Mary Jo to come get me. I could hear Mary Jo in the next room in consultation with a client on the phone. She talks loud.

Mary Jo came and got me and took me into an office. There was a computer desk and a computer on one side, and two chairs facing each other separated by a table on the other side, near a window overlooking a parking lot. On the table were a lamp, a tape recorder, and a large bowl full of sugar free candies.

She was very friendly, open, and smiled a lot. She asked me to sit in one chair and I sat in the other. She asked me if I had ever done "anything like this" before, and I explained that I had not. She asked me how I came to be there. I explained that I had married Amy and Julius, and they gave me the sitting because they knew I was "into this sort of thing." She asked something (I don't recall exactly) that led me to disclose I was an ordained minister. She asked me where my congregation was. I explained the Universal Life church was a non-denominational Internet church. She thought the church was wonderful, and then started to tell me about the reading.

She said she did two kinds of readings. The first kind was completely in trance, and she said her guides told her what to say. She said she was not gone, and that she was conscious of her speaking, but that she goes into a "higher" state of consciousness. She other kind of reading is more "back and forth" and "one-on-one." I asked which is better. She said it depends on what the client wants. The trance stuff is more particular to my soul, while the other kind of reading was more particular to my life and day to day living. I said that I was fond of fast food value menus, and wondered if I could get a little of both. She said many people ask her for that, indicated it was not what she liked to do, but that I was special and so she would do it.

The trance message (track one below) is a bunch of jabber-jab and mixed metaphors. I was pretty bored with that. For the beginning of the reading I was pretty stone faced, trying to see how good she was. She wasn't very good until I started willfully volunteering information. Once I let more information out (a few times, you'll notice, she even asks direct questions), she got better. One time when she was stumped, she grabbed a piece of candy and sucked on it a while (you'll hear it).

The information that sticks out to me, and that which I'll keep a watch out for, concerns: (1) my spirit guide Elliott; could this be Calvin Elliott, my Masonic mentor? (2) I will have two important mentors at Texas; could this be Barry and Dana? (3) I will get hitched when I am 37 to an independent lady; who will that be? (4) kidney disease runs in my mother's side of the family, three generations back; (5) my bones are brittle, and the spirit guides warned me; (6) one of my tonsils has grown back; (7) something big, perhaps a promotion, will happen in 2007; god I would be thrilled to peeing in my pants if that means I'll have tenure by 2008.

Here's a photograph of me with Mary Jo. Finally, without further ado, here is the reading. Each track is in mp3 format:

1. Speaking in Trance as "Elliot"

2. I'll Have to Think About It"

3. Out of Trance, Popps

4. "When's Your Birthday?"

5. Leading People to Their Deaths

6. New Job and Your Tonsil Has Grown Back

7. Romance

8. Moving to Austin

On Flashbacks, or, On Going Back In

Music: Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon/Division Bell

O (name of voyager) The time has come for you to seek new levels of reality. Your ego and the (name) game are about to cease. You are about to be set face to face with the Clear Light. You are about to experience it in its reality. In the ego-free state, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, And the naked spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum; At this moment, know yourself and abide in that state. O (name of voyager, that which is called ego-death is coming to you. --Timothy Leary, "Instructions for Use During a Psychedelic Session"

There is a curious point in the psychedelic experience when a "voyager" (to use Leary's terminology) recognizes simultaneously the call of a familiar stranger (Alpert/Ram Das' "Be Here Now") and familiar feeling of "place." The call is usually in the form of a voice, either of a fellow voyager or of one's self (the sudden recognition of self-moaning). Listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon this morning as a read the paper reminded me of the call; the album opens with the gradually audible sound of a heart beat, and when the first vocals come calling, they say: "Breathe, breathe, in the air, don't be afraid to care/Leave but don't leave me/Look around and choose your own ground." It's obviously the call of mother, the welcoming and horrifying experience of what David Schwarz terms a "threshold crossing." This call of both comfort and responsibility ("welcome back" and "don't leave me" or "don't hurt anybody") is inextricably related to place or a familiar feeling of place: here I am, again. Later in the Pink Floyd album, when the opening song reprises after a tutorial on "time," Gilmour sings: "Home, home again/I like to be here when I can . . . . " Over a decade ago, when I was still experimenting with lysergic acid on a routine basis, I remember when my fellow voyagers and I dosed we tended to find this place of recognition at the same time and one of us would provide the maternal voice with a grin and moan, or by saying something like, "here we are again."

Homologous feelings in more mundane reality are not difficult to pin-point: aside from the obvious experience of sexual intercourse (much less so self-love), I sometimes sense the pleasure of threshold crossings when I return to the classroom at the beginning of a new semester, or when I'm (unusually) aware of falling asleep, or when resting my head in the lap of a good listener, or when I'm suddenly brought to an exciting memory, like this morning, when on a whim I decided to listen to Dark Side of the Moon. Such crossings are not always pleasant ones, of course: newborns do not seem particularly happy whey they are greeted for the first time.

Isn't Ziggy the perfect illustration of the psychedelic threshold crossing? Or the newest news of the weird, a toddler who so strongly desired a stuffed animal within a toy machine at the local Wal-Mart that he crawled back into the lost and desired familiar place? We are told by reporters that, rather than shame or blame the child, the parents were so bemused by the incident they bought a disposable camera to capture images of the seemingly impossible. We can probably assume the child was greeted with laughter and soothing voices, confirmation of his sojourn back to that familiar place . The story reminds me of an anecdote Freud tells in The Interpretation of Dreams about his famous daughter: little Anna dreams of eating lots of strawberries. If I remember correctly, Freud says such a dream doesn't need too much interpretation. Similarly, we need not belabor the point that our would-be Houdini has crawled back into the womb.

I suppose the problem of this fantasy, like all fantasy, is that too easily tempts the sloth of Love, or mistaking the familiar place and voice with self-transparency (one's own voice as the core seat of consciousness; Derrida's early career compellingly details why this is a huge problem). The trouble with Leary, I realize only having come down from my drug use many, many years ago, is that this feeling is mistaken for a loss of "ego." He also ignored the evil that people do protecting or returning to their lost familiar places, and even that sometimes you need to force people from their "ego-less-ness" to keep the lost alive. I think the concept of utopia is much more worthy of defense than (re)birthing metaphor (e.g., being "born again" in that cheerful, Christian fundamentalist sense) because utopia is from the onset impossible. Zion is a much better surrogate for the womb precisely because you really cannot go back; fucking your way up the chain of being is really a euphemism for fucking people over, however funny or cute they may think you are.

Perhaps this is why some of us fear having children.

PDA

I don't do this sort of thing in my blog because its too personal. I don't know what's gotten into me.

the bride is back: fall into the gap

Music: David Sylvian: Secrets of the Beehive One of the most refreshing and disturbing aspects of Zizek's writing is its (seemingly) fearless capacity to name the unnamable. Zizek is not shy about discussing his capacity for misogyny (and our own regardless of "sex"), often holding up a mirror. Reading the Albuquerque Police Department offense report filed about Jennifer Wilbanks abduction fantasy and her subsequent confession that it was just that, a fantasy, I was reminded of a passage by Zizek that startled and disturbed me some years ago. In order to demonstrate the "fantasmic support" of our "everyday symbolic universe" (that is, in order to explain how fantasy keeps us from going insane), Zizek outlines a homology between a scene from Lynch's Wild at Heart (a scene when William Dafoe sexually assaults Laura Dern, demanding that she say, "say fuck me!") and an Old South lynching. "The traumatic impact of these two scenes," he says, "relies on the gap between the subject's everyday symbolic universe and its fantasmic support." This "gap" is perhaps better understood, he continues,

through another disturbing phenomenon. When attention is drawn to the fact that women often do fantasize about being handled brutally and raped, the standard answer to it is either that this is a male fantasy about women or that women only have such fantasies in so far as they have "internalized" the patriarchal libidinal economy and endorsed their victimization. The underlying idea is that the moment we recognize this fact of day-dreaming about rape, we open the door to male-chauvinist platitudes about how, in being raped, women only get what they secretly wanted; their shock and fear only express the fact that they were not honest enough to acknowledge this. To this commonplace, one should answer that (some) women actually may day-dream about being raped, but this fact in no way legitimizes the actual rape, it makes it even more violent. Consider two women, the first, liberated and assertive, active; the other, secretly day-dreaming about being brutally handled by her partner, even raped. The crucial point is that, if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second one, on account of the very fact that it will realize in "external" social reality the "stuff of her dreams." Perhaps a better way to put it would be to paraphrase yet again the immortal lines of Stalin: it is impossible to say which of the two rapes would be worse. ("Fantasy as a Political Category," in the Zizek Reader, pp. 96-97)

Well, one cannot accuse Zizek of beating around the bush in this passage, or, more precisely, one can accuse him of beating it almost to death. There is as much to say about Zizek's subjective symbolic universe as there is his point. Nevertheless, his point is that in either "case," a kind of violence ruptures the illusions that sustain us. Rape fantasy is a fantasy but is rooted in the symbolic; what the "actual" rape discloses is the impossibility of integrating one's symbolic existence with what is fleeting felt as "I"—the essence. No matter how wildly or genuinely perverse one's fantasy life may be, the point is that as an event, the violation of rape is a confrontation with impossibility and meaninglessness, the unraveling of symbolic safety. The "object" (although it's not really the object) or that which fantasy ultimately stages is not transgression, but the law itself, negatude, the power of "no" itself. Zizek reminds us that in Freudo-speak, ultimately fantasy stages the scene of castration, the "symbolic cut."

So why is rape fantasy so overdetermined? Lets consider our Runaway Bride's story: she was abducted by a dumpy white woman and a mid-sized Hispanic with "bad teeth." They bound her and drove for thirty minutes. Then, as the man was still driving, the woman removed Wilbank's and her own pants, and proceeded to eat-out Wilbanks. Then, she demanded Wilbanks eat her out as the man parked the van, moved to the back, and penetrated her. Wilbanks continued servicing the woman until the abductor reached orgasm, the man withdrew, everyone put their drawers back on, and they rode on. It turns out the abductors were characters based on a couple Wilbanks met on a bus to Austin.

In part, the fantasy is overdetermined for the reasons that I discussed in a previous post: Wilbanks created the classically hysterical scenario of identifying with the desire of the Other. The report itself only proves my point: what is a more clichéd hetero-male fantasy than two chicks licking each other's "clits" (the slang is part of the fantasy—and I'm trying not to be misogynistic here while acknowledging my misogyny; like every subject born into This American Symbolic, we're taught to love/hate the Other from the get-go)? The overdetermination is tired: its not just the cliché that probably tipped off police, nor is it the idea that one not could successfully perform cunnilingus and bring another to orgasm while being raped. It's the transgression made possible by the law in the first place—Mary Douglas on purity and pollution—that makes Wilbank's story so stupid: of course its an exoticized man; of course it’s a dumpy white woman; of course she's getting it coming and going; of course the music she heard on the radio was "Spanish," and so on (the only things missing are midgets and farm animals).

What makes the rape fantasy inevitable is this "gap" that Zizek talks about, which Wilbanks stages and attempts to rupture with the act of sacred violation: one is supposed to get married by thirty to a strong, god-fearing, stand-up kind of man, have a home and two SUVs, make babies, and aspire to live in a suburban neighborhood that has underground utility wires, sod, and built-in sprinkler systems with a number of nicely groomed pine-needle islands. The media originally picked up the story because of Wilbanks' violation of this, the sanctity of marriage vows and what it represents. I don't need to rehearse the deeper violence marriage has masked for centuries here, nor is the real "rape" here being discussed (just vet the statements of the fiance, his father, and the preacher and its clearly a case of Jennifer's Extreme Makeover, hosted by Jesus with a buzz cut [who just took up a sponsorship with Sears]). I don't want to make Wilbanks into a feminist champion—for that she's certainly a "lost cause" given the way she's consumed by the familial patriarchs—but I do want to suggest that what we have here is homology, or perhaps even better, the formal inversion of a perverse desire to "be the Law," as Zizek would put it. In other words, what Wilbanks did is perverse in the sense that that we cannot locate motive in transgression—that which many of us get off on—but rather its failure. Our runaway bride is not running away at all: she's trying to be the bride in the most extreme possible, in a way abjectly subservient to the Law, or better, in a way that attempts to model the law-as-function, to close or altogether avoid the gap via self-abstraction (alternately, aphanasis). This is all the more reason why the media have returned to the bride's story once again. The lurid, "explicit" details of the rape fantasy are a ruse. The extremity of the term "rape" points up transgression/violation, but this is running cover for something different altogether. Although rape is a signifier for a horrifyingly real crime, its evocation is not enough to even convince the Law of its truth (the FBI smelled something fishy from the start, they say). The cultural work of rape in this "news story" is doing the work of perversion. Wilbanks is the Bride from Hell.

dictiophobia?

Music: DJ Yeshu: For Reisha 3 My future colleague Rod Hart developed a computer program, Diction, that does content analysis (word counts) on speeches that are filtered through it. I've never used the program, but it sounds like fun (check out this sample of an analysis of one of Bush's speeches)

The poor man's Diction—that which I can afford—is the Internet "counter," an embedded ticker of sorts that can tell one much more than how many visitors visit a page on a given day (mine is in the lower right there). My counter provider, bravenet.com, can also tell you the referring page of a visitor. Many of my hits are direct or from the blogs of friends, however, almost half are from google searches. For the past week I tracked all the google searches that led a surfer to my blog. The results are somewhat predictable, but also curious: do these google searches track the content of my unconscious? Oh my, what Rod might make of these "key terms" and search prhases?

"mary jo mccabe upcoming seminars baton rouge"; "Freemason in twentieth century literature"; "JENNIFER WILBANKS NUDE"; i have forgiven jesus"; "masonic secrets occult"; "hauntology justice"; "anal punishment suppositories"; "runaway bride Wilbanks rape"; "Larpenteur cemetery ghost OR haunted"; Virgen de Guadalupe under the Kennedy expressway";"Sartre on Love," "where is address of black Christmas sorority"; "ronell avital; alien abduction stories probe"; "sartre love"; "Humanist mourning"; "sartre on love"; "albert pike, dark arts"; Alan Smithee's dune; "Zizek and Operation Desert Storm"; "dark arts mystic satanic books writing"; "you know there's nothing more than this"; How to do things with words -co –com"; free porn occult orgy rite magic"; "Hamlet,humanism"; secrecy themed essays"; "David Sylvian homosexual"; "huffing scotchguard" ;"rape fiction anal daddy punishment"; "dukaka japan"; "amanda reed"; "symbolism mason"; "passion of the christ"

There is much to comment on here, but because I am moderately astonished (the anal daddy rape business is unnerving) I think I'll go to bed and read Robertson Davies, skimming for nice words to imbed for better traffic.

matrimonimania

Music: And Also the Trees: Further From the Truth Although for over a week and a half the bug-eyed mug of Jennifer Wilbanks was inescapable, the major networks uniformly dropped coverage of her disappearance and return the day after her public statement. Indeed, there was little coverage of the statement, so I was led to wonder why the story was dropped so suddenly. When it's just "another" hysterical woman, there's no "story there." I beg to differ.

Wilbanks, a 32 year old woman betrothed to John Mason, staged an abduction and caught a bus to Las Vegas a week before she was to be married. Having grown up the son of a wedding photographer in the very county Wilbanks lived, I can attest that when the media reported hers was a "big wedding," big should be translated as ridiculously huge. Although the enormity of a typical, "southern" wedding in Gwinnett County Georgia didn't escape mention, the overblown symbolic gesture of these kinds of events was rarely if ever discussed. Last week in class I forged an analogy between the fear of being a drone animated by a machine (e.g., as in The Matrix films or in terms of Star Trek's "The Borg") and what it must be like to be a bride or groom days before a typical, "southern" wedding in Gwinnett County Georgia: large weddings serve to remind the bride and groom that this event is not their event, but an event that has captured them, that runs them, that reminds them that the so-called "choice" they have made is socially scripted. That's the rub about this story of the "runaway bride": it's a cultural fantasy that belies another, a cynical excitement that tacitly critiques the Disney-esque fantasy of soul-deep love at the very same time as it is blind to its own seductive construction: Runaway Bride is a film about how a man meets a woman, the woman runs away, that man recaptures the woman, and then gives the ring back. Mr. Mason is reported to have offered the ring back to Ms. Wilbanks first they saw each other after she returned from her Magic Bus Ride (as Peter McKnight argued, "love is blind, after all, and Mason demonstrates it is also deaf and dumb").

The older I get and the more I watch (I see), the more Jean Baudrillard seems less hyperbolic.

The scenario does seem like conspicuous fantasy all the way down to the last turtle (I say "conspicuous" because I'm not about to claim, a la Baudrillard, we have assassinated the real; all we got are turtles). We can start, first, with the racial rape fantasy: After planting a wad of hair and making all the preparations weeks in advance, and after realizing life away from the Symbolic is impossible, Wilbanks claimed that she was abducted by a Hispanic man and a "white woman" with a handgun and then sexually assaulted in a blue van driving West. Of course, the man could have also been an African American, but there had to be a woman, and this woman had to be white like her. Why do I say this? Because the rape fantasy reflects a textbook case of the psychical structure of hysteria, and because the story Wilbanks told is classically hysteric.

Hysteria is, indeed, the structure that articulates Wilbank's apparent "mental illness," her fantasies, and more importantly, the media coverage of the three. From a psychoanalytic standpoint hysteria concerns a subject who attempts to become the object of the desire of the Other. There are two others here, of course, but each of them is merely a surrogate for the same Other: John Mason, the fiancé and symbolic other, and the imaginary Hispanic man (both of whom will "give it to her"). Typically, the hysterical subject attempts to become the a desired object by identifying with someone (or something) that she is not. There is always a "triangle" between the hysterical subject (a), another subject (b), and the Other, whose desire the subject (a) wants but seeks to achieve it by identifying with another (b). The racial and sexual elements of the abduction narrative (well, aside from formally resembling the triangulations common in alien abduction stories) are thus explained: The Hispanic man represents the "evil" fiancé, the threat the Other always poses, and his "exoticization," at least to Wilbanks, represents that love which is always elusive; the woman with a gun represents a strong willed woman, the object of the Hispanic man's desire, and perhaps the strength Wilbanks seems to lack. Well, you can read the abduction fantasy in a number of ways, but at the level of form, the hallmarks of hysteria— triangulation and self-displacement—is so obvious it's almost laughable. What's terribly unfortunate about this well known cultural fantasy of the racialized man as a phobogenic object is that is kills people.

We should not be surprised, then, to find the issue of "control" at the center of Wilbank's "public statement":

At this time, I cannot explain fully what happened to me last week. I had a host of compelling issues, which seemed out of control — issues for which I was unable to address or confine. Please, may I assure you that my running away had nothing to do with “cold feet,” nor was it ever about leaving John. Those who know me know how excited I’ve been, and how excited I was about the spectacular wedding we planned, and how I could not wait to be Mrs. John Mason.

Oh please! Of course it was all about leaving John, it was about "Dear John," the John who represents simultaneously an object of love and hate. It was about the John that had to be left and who had to suffer! John is not her lover, he is her disciplinarian and teacher, her father, her priest. Mr. Mason is the patriarch who, however ironically, is even more strongly rehabilitated despite the fact the "runaway" is an unquestionable critique. Aside from the scripted hysteria fantasies of Wilbanks, the mass media coverage of the story similarly characterizes Mr. Mason as the strong but loving man with the power to forgive and forget. Clearly, any bride leaving her husband to be is not so sure about her man—-heck, no one is but one simply makes a leap of faith; but the unreasonable pressure to be certain at the level of one's soul apparently backfires in twenty percent of planned marriages. Nevertheless, any trek across the country to "escape" the institution of marriage is a commentary on the institution as well as the figure of the husband. One by one the patriarchs were trotted out on screen: the Reverend Tom Smiley testified to Wilbank's sincere regret and Mason gave face to his amazing powers of forgiveness.

The media portrayal of the "strong men" shepparding this weak (and forcedly passive) woman to her right mind reminded me of a discussion Tracy and I had regarding women in the workplace. Tracy and Doug are working on starting a family (sounds like fun to me), and she noted she was feeling some anxiety about getting pregnant in the academy. She cited some studies that noted women who get pregnant before tenure are discriminated against by their colleagues and institutions, however, men are seen as heroic. We see, of course, the same framing at work in the Wilbanks case: the situation is so overdetermined that her only option at this point is to SUBMIT! Evidence enough of her return from whoredom (clearly cued by the sexual assault fantasy) is her current packaging as a troubled woman with "compelling issues," a woman of purity and abject subservience to the Other: Like mother Theresa and the Virgin Mary, for $16, 000 you can own the visage of the runaway bride on a piece of Wonderbread toast by bidding on ebay.

Like returning to a cult, the closing remarks of Wilbank's statement is passive move and a return to the Law of the Father, the injunction that thou shall never not stand by your man: "As John said on countless occasions recently, may we follow the teaching of Scripture, in being kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving, just as God in Christ forgives us. Thank you." Pathology is sin; only the fiancé/Jesus and his phallic power can forgive. So Mote It Be

On Ruining My Career

Music: VNV Nation: Matter + Form Many have advised me, from my early days in graduate school up until relatively recently, that I ought not publish on this or that because it would not be good for my career. I recall fondly all the advice--much of which I heeded--during the interviewing process (for example, if your research is on the devil, it would behoove one to diversify a monochromatic wardrobe). I recall one scholar suggesting that if Mike Allen published my adolescent thoughts on "what constitutes publishable rhetorical criticism?" it would--and I quote--"ruin his career."

I think what's been more ruinous to our discipline is a lack of risk taking (this is certainly the case with the new VNV album). Tomorrow I will submit for review and publication the riskiest yet: an essay on shit. If this doesn't destroy my career, then the only thing left is to do an autoethnography of my having sex with a goat and a young male prostitue in my office at school, while making my class in argumentation theory watch and take notes, to the soundtrack of German power-noise music. So here goes:

ShitText: Gluttony in Reverse, or, Toward a New Coprophilic Style

RUNNING HEAD: ShitText

MANUSCRIPT HISTORY: Different versions and portions of this essay have been presented under the title "Same Shit, Different Conference" at the 2003, 2004, and 2005 annual meetings of the National Communication Association in Miami, Chicago, and Boston respectively

AUTHOR NOTE: Delightfully retained for the purposes of blind review,

ABSTRACT An argumentative account of text, body, and (the) discipline as fields of shit.

KEY WORDS: academic publishing, actionism, analationality, anal object, autoethnography, babies, body body body body body BODY, bio-power, confession, constipation, dispositif, embodied text (constipation), farts and farting, fascism, globalization, gold, governmentality, homo economicus, hygienic apparatus, Foucault, Frenchness, Freud,, laxitativity, masochism, money, narcissism, performance, performativity, perfumetivity, phallus, poop, postmarxism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, piss and pissing, public address, pride, repression, scato-power, shit and shitting, shitliciousness, sphincteralationality, surveillance, textuality, turd fuckery, Ziploc(r) baggie

We represent the International of excreta, the stinking turds of the new planetary order! We are fragmented, dispersed, they can sweep us away with their water hoses and then sterilize the ground with disinfectants and pesticides! If we are united, they won't be able to flush us down the drain! -The Metro Defecator (Goytisolo 36)

Thus spoke the anal character in Juan Goytisolo's novel State of Siege, a street-shitting prophet who calls for the "foul-smelling tide" of the rabble to choke the streets and temples with an inescapably human hyle, an irreducible excess no perfume or elaborate hygienics can completely eradicate. To be sure, the Defecator understood the anal imaginary: in the beginning there was a turd, and this turd was gold. Yet if the State was to emerge, the "rustic swill" of one's privates must be packed privately away, domesticated, perfumed, and transmuted into money; one had to mind one's own business for the business of a public to emerge (Laporte).

As is the case with all economies, the anal imaginary is both social and individual (see Brown 202-206). In his elaboration of the development of subjectivity in childhood, for example, Freud is careful to remind us that the first gift one has to offer is, in fact, shit. But shitting is also that erotogenic pleasure that one is to first repress for membership in a given public. In the original occasion of self-conscious shitting-upon first encountering the symbolic as law, the command to "shit in this little potty"-the child "has a glimpse of an environment hostile to [her] instinctual impulses. . . . From that time on, what is 'anal' remains the symbol of everything that is to be repudiated and excluded from life" ("Infantile" 187, n. 1). Potty training is the moment when we become self-conscious, social subjects, enfoldments of norms, customs, and habits that comprise our social realities and that introduce us to an anal economy that we must subsequently repress (see Frankel). Potty training is thus the originary site of civic performativity, that primary, empirical moment of public subjectification, literally the first command performance of citizenship.

In light of anal disciplinationality, the Metro Defecator represents a figure who has regressed to embrace his anality as a way to resist transnational capitalists: "Our foul-smelling tide," reports the prophet, "will immobilize your beautifully tailored executives on the sidewalks . . . will fill your mansions with a stench that will chase the inhabitants out and then infiltrate the offices and banks till it reaches the safe deposit boxes and transmutes the gold and the banknotes into shit" (Goytisolo 36)! As the governance of the nation state gives way to governmentality and the society of discipline metamorphoses into the society of control, so does bio-power deepen the regulation of all life, particularly in terms of what goes into and exits from our bodies (Deleuze, "Control" 169-176; Deleuze, "Postscript" 177-182; Foucault, History 135-159). The Defecator is a good role model for materialist scholars and practitioners because he resists imperial globalization by taking back his anus, celebrating the excesses of his own productive capacity and calling for others to do the same. Indeed, it is precisely the celebration and production of the anal object-that from which we are most alienated-that the consumerist logics of capitalism can be thw(f)arted: consumerism is countered with bodily excess, prideful overproduction, gluttony in reverse.

Among other things, Goytisolo's novel is symptomatic of a global repression of anality and the consequent emergence of a sadistic subjectivity whose lifeworld is now governed by the sado-masochistic norms of giving and withholding. To resist the sadistification of Self that results in fascism, as well as the evaporation of material labor and the arrival of immaterial labor (which, of course, threatens a more insidious form of exploitation), there must not be a multitudinous "refusal to work," but a popular proliferation of excessive bodily production (see Hardt and Negri 203-204).2 To wit, in order to resist the pernicious effects of transnational capitalism, we should return to the old Actionist, Yippist, and Scumfuc strategies of shitting in public. Like Günter Brus, Abbie Hoffman, and G. G. Allin, the Defecator is a refreshing figure precisely because he reminds us of the Real in the midst of a blob-like Empire that "is planted with a virtuality that seeks to be real," as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it (359). The typical gesture of crusty socialists when confronting the reality of postmodernity-if only in theory, which is surely an index of its arrival-is to point to either the international division of labor and the persistence of agrarian economies on the one hand, or the "concrete constitutive effects" of exploitation and the survival of violent, oppressive sovereignties on the other (see Lazarus 94-138). This tired wind-bagging needs some good shit, and to this end in this essay I argue for a new coprophilic style of public address or performance (viz., of shitting/speaking within a public) as a means for contending with an increasingly totalizing, consumerist hygienics that has infiltrated every domain of social life, most especially the field of academic publishing.

Want more of this shit? Find an HTML draft of of the essay here.

Long live the new flesh. Word.

(Under)Passing Salt

Music: The Cult: Sonic Temple Last week the news broke that the Virgin Mary has appeared--in some accounts, embracing Pope John Paul II--beneath an overpass/turn-off area on the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. The television news media have been subsequently reporting the sightings in "curiosity" news segments (I was alerted to the event by the Today show).

It goes without saying events like this intrigue me. But they also sadden me: so desperate are some individuals for the supernatural, for the arrival of a divine limb to "fix" whatever is broken in their lives, that salt deposits oozing out of a slab of concrete have become tokens of a divine grace yet to come. Waiting for an end that never comes is a source of hope for many. It is a true pity that Lefty secularists have not figured this out to aid them in the contemporary political scene; somehow the apocalyptic tone of The Communist Manifesto has been expunged from materialist efforts on paper and in "real life." Derrida's teaching, that Communism is a ghost that is always yet to come but that will never arrive, has been much too safely put to rest--along with his interred corpse.

Reactions to the loss of the sense of yet-to-come (usually blamed on a post- this or that) have been characteristically pragmatic in tone (and, therefore, dangerously atheistic) or abjectly revolutionary (and, therefore, tempting the label of "trouble-maker," "outlaw," and/or "asshole").

As I've suggested elsewhere, one can understand the "faith" in seeing Jesus Christ in a cornflake as our inherent tendency to attribute pattern to the seemingly random, a phenomenon one philosopher terms paradolia, akin to seeing circus animals in the clouds ("you say Virgen de Guadalupe, I say Vagina!"). The profound sense of lack motivating such attributions, however, seems to be increasing: Jack Van Impe and his companion, Rexella, continue to haunt UPN television stations everywhere, but at earlier and earlier hours; Revelations is a hit on NBC; and apocalyptic thrillers continue to top best-sellers lists.

Isn't there something the Left can do to channel supernatural anthropomorphic desire? Indeed, there is: Slavoj Zizek: The Movie! I suggest we make a pilgrimage to Ljubljana (or wherever he is in the world at present) to sit at his feet. Perhaps we can insert small candles of homage in his unkempt beard to mark out the faces of Marx and Hegel that we find.

anti-intellectual a-pop-calytpic

Music: The String Cheese Incident: Live in Austin Texas (The Backyard), March 2001 When Sunday slowness and grading bad student papers mix, ranting is sometimes a curious progeny (take that as a warning, gentle reader). I've always found the sometimes overly zealous grandstanding against "anti-intellectualism" by the academic Left—especially the self-appointed vanguards of theory—mildly irritating. I say mildly because, on the one had, righteousness is sometimes a good thing and can actually get things done (that is not an endorsement, however, Lil' Bushie). I say irritating because, despite the many virtues of critical thinking, sometimes that thinking can be used toward mean ends and to make fun of the innocent ignorance of others.

Nevertheless, if I may constellate two white dwarves from the past week: First, a story has just come out regarding two enterprising MIT students who created a computer program that randomly generates so-called postmodern gibberish. The students "questioned the standards of some academic conferences," so they wrote this program to create nonsensical papers and, lo and behold, one of them was accepted for a conference. (Now, it goes without saying that anyone in academics anywhere knows that one can probably wipe your ass with 5th grade poetry and get it accepted as art or knowledge at some conference some where; when in doubt, there's always the annual Popular Culture Association Conference). It is, of course, an echo of the Sokal Affair, yet another "prank" waged in the so-called "culture wars."

Second, a new, multi-million dollar miniseries, Revelations, debuted on the National Broadcasting Company network last Wednesday (and repeats this evening), which attempts to provide an account of John of Patmos' occult vision of the End of Days. Such an account, of course, is a blatant rip-off of the vengeful Christ's return in the Left Behind book series, which novelizes—in thousands upon thousands of pages—an innovation in church doctrine that can be traced back to the quasi-spiritualist teachings of the Irvingites, promulgated and popularized by John Darby in the nineteenth century (on the quick and dirty: basically, the story is that the faithful will be called to heaven before the antichrist makes the globe his oyster). Nevertheless, I did watch the debut and will see the entire series, insofar as it intersects with my personal and scholarly interests and, well, it's much more than a television event: Revelations represents the outworking of a cultural and political politics particular to our time, most especially since evangelical beliefs have increasingly dominated the political theatre, first in the (middle) East, now with Lil' Bushie (dialectal foil to the prison-bound Lil' Kim) in the West. Insofar as our president has declared himself St. Michael in the flesh, when a major television network devotes significant dollars and time to airing an evangelical interpretation of Scripture, especially when Kirk Cameron, Howie Mandel, or Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston are not involved, we really should to take notice.

So, on the one hand, some "clever" graduate students poke fun of pomo prose (it has just occured to me, dear reader, that there may be an associo-semantic rationale for postmodernism's bad "rap"; its slang form, "pomo," is phonetically too reminiscent of "porno", that which, in fact, yokes Lil' Kim to Lil' Bushie by way of Mel Gibson's "passion"). On the other, blind faith in a vengeful God is aired as "entertainment." The common cause of both events is a negotiation of and over the figure of the Great Professor, a figure that is well-known, overly stereotyped, and increasingly under attack. I won't recount my own personal run-ins with the sons and daughters of wealthy southern lawyers and socialites, or the mistaken attribution of power made by students, their families, and professors alike. Instead, we'll just recount the function of the professor in Revelations: first, there's the protagonist, Bill Pullman, a real Doubting Thomas whose daughter is killed by servant of Satan in a ritual sacrifice; he has no faith, but upon meeting a crazy Nun with a Ph.D. (see, they do give those things to just about anyone willing to endure the scholarly rites of torture), he starts to realize that all that stuff he once understood as "knowledge" is mere bullshit, and that he really needs to get down with the Vengeful Jesus Program (hereafer VJP). Bill Pullman represents the stupid and soulless ranks of the scholar-teacher. Hooray! Then there's Pullman's mentor, played by John Rhys-Davies, who opens the series with a lecture to his students on the Big Bang. An earnest young man asks something to the effect of, "well, where is God in all this." Rhys-Davies retorts, in a booming male voice, that science makes room for everything and everyone, even God, if only "he" would make "himself" known (my good friend and colleague Jenny Stromer-Galley commented she is so tired of the bombastic or arrogant white male (usually a Harvard professor, right?) as our professoriate poster boy). Both fictional professors are dumb to the signs that the end is near.

Similarly, suggest the clever MIT grads, postmodern theorists, caught in sticky mire of their excretions (jargon and gibberish), are dumb to common sense. In short, professors are idiots and soulless.

I admit I am becoming tired of these attacks and fears, which have only relatively recently begun to chafe. Most of the good people who dedicate themselves to the life of the mind are the antithesis of idiocy or soullessness. I suppose this is the irony of the anti-intellectual's charge.

I have often thought it but bit my tongue, yet, since I'm a bit pissy today, I'll let it out: people often fear what they don't know or understand. In other words, anti-intellectualism is a synonym for stupidity. Some people—and certainly a handful of grad students I've met since coming to LSU—don't merit the kinder euphemism.

Freak Orgy

Music: Steve Earle: El Corazon

CONSERVATIVELY DRESSED LADY #1:Does your Ultrathin ever get wet and sticky? YOUNGISHLY DRESSED LADY #2: Yeah [elaboration ensues] --Dialogue from a commercial I just witnessed

I swear there is something in the air today, tons of freak-out fumes wafting from the SUV Juice factories down the Mississippi, over our humble, pot-holed streets and into our places of work, worship, learning (and places of pretend-to-work, pretend-to-pray-but-secretly-look-to-see-who-isn't, and pretend-to-learn). Lord knows I've been talked to because I am too free of opinion in the classroom, but today something unfortunate slipped. We were discussing arguments concerning the validity of alien abduction stories. One student suggested that if aliens existed, then we would have been eaten and enslaved by now (flashback to the V miniseries). Another student said, "cause that's what we would do if we actually found an alien race, especially one that was inferior" or something like that. A student asked my opinion, and I inappropriately retorted: oh, hell, we'd probably kill or enslave the poor folks. For sure some idiot male would want to screw one. Well, by "we" I meant we conservative, Republican, militia-types. But the larger "we" know this is true: if it moves, some idiot male will want to "probe" it (or stick it up his derriere). I don't suppose anyone watches The Blob anymore (unless they're in Tracy's horror film class). Doncha' know the first thing the old man does when he discoveres the new life form is poke it with a stick?

Like I said, but this time in rhyme, there's something in the air

MICHAEL JACKSON IS A FUCKED FUCKER

Every day the story becomes even more absurd. Money does, indeed, buy one whatever warped reality one wishes to be inside. While unmistakably the prosecutors of the case and their team have not lost sight of the humanity of the situation (that is to say, the recognition that Michael Jackson sees these poor damaged boys as a some over-zealous macho type would see helpless animals), the reportage of the courtroom horror in the television and newspaper is downright surreal in terms of its ability to withhold judgment or censure. A colleague recently said that is was as if Jackson could not "help himself." And this is the point: Michael Jackson, as Jean Baudrillard might carp in a flourish much less but so much more pretentious, does not exist. He is, effectively, an automaton of the collective imaginary.

GRAPHIC NOVELS

I am mildly self-disturbed at my perverse enjoyment of The Preacher comic book series, which is so full of hetero-fantasies of abject machismo that I'm sure it gives Sin City a run for its money (I can see someone filming this one next). I picked up the series some weeks ago, remembering an answer to a question I asked almost four years ago at the comic shop on the corner of Larpenteur and Snelling Avenues in St. Paul, Minnesota. I told a clerk I liked Hellblazer, which I had read as a teen up until I left for college. What's the most Satanic or religious-themed comic out there? He said next to Hellblazer, it was Preacher. Somehow I filed that away and then, after I saw the filmic version of my favorite Teen Age graphic pleasure (proto-porn, like Heavy Metal magazine in the days before Internet porno was just a key stroke away), I ordered a couple of the graphic novel sets of the comics. It's about a dude from Louisiana who was born into a warped and racist family who produces lines of preachers who escapes and then is possessed by a spirit/entity called "Genesis," which is the oops offspring of an Angel and a Demon who did the dirty deed in purgatory. God is all pissed off, orders another wingless order of angels to keep this Half-Evil-Half-Good entity in check. But the entity escapes and possesses the preacher and gives him magical powers of command . . . and so on and so forth. Lots of dirty language and cartoon breasts, excessively violent, inexplicable vampiric buddies, people's whose faces resemble assholes, and so forth.

I, TOO, HAVE A CRUSH ON MABALEAN EPHRIAM

In the past year I have developed a healthy addiction to courtroom shows, especially Divorce Court. My favorite episode thus far is about a couple with two very interesting and dynamic personalities. The husband is into "role playing" with women in dominant roles. The wife enjoys dominating the husband, and demonstrates to the court how a certain tone of voice can make the husband howl. She uses "the voice," and the husband howls uncontrollably. As the episode progresses, we learn that the one of the bases of the divorce is his irrational attraction to the judge. The wife again demonstrates by reaching to a shopping bag, pulling out a robe and gavel, and putting them on. Suddenly the viewer is treated to a pretty charming look-alike of Judge Ephiram and the obviously turned-on husband, and the judge herself is visible amazed and embarrassed. I have not seen better television in many, many months.

MY CAT PSAPPHO AND MS. BIRDPARTY

To round out my rumination on the freak orgy, I present the gentle reader with a photo of my cat, Psappho:

I also present to you the photo of the newest member on my blogroll, the most luscious Ms. Birdparty:

Please click on her link to the right or the photo above to be whisked away to her blog, which is almost entirely a chronicle of her most excellent responses to random personal ads (you'll thank me later, I promise).

Freak Orgy: I rest my case.

What I Said Yesterday to the Masonic High 12 Club

Music: Shellyan Orphan: Humroot I want to thank you all for having me, and your generosity and invitation is proof enough that Masonic fellowship, like justice, is blind to a given brother's personal eccentricities or appearance.

My interest in Masonry was cultivated as a result of my research into the Western occult tradition in the 19th and 20the centuries. This research began about five years ago at the University of Minnesota as I was preparing to write my dissertation for my degree. My talk today is derived from that work, which will be published as a book this August. The book is about the object of strange, mysterious, or difficult language and symbols, including the forces behind their invention, and the experience of hearing, reading, and interpreting such difficult language.

Put in more familiar biblical terms, my research concerns the modern equivalent of the shibboleth, a term for the famous speech-password in the book of Judges. I suggest that the story of the warring Semitic tribes can certainly be read as an occult allegory for the keeping and telling of secrets. As many of you well know, the story goes like this: Ephraimites and the Gileadites are warring, and the latter defeats the former. The Gileadites fashion a blockade to catch fleeing E Ephraimites, and established a password to let their buddies through. Each escapee is asked to pronounce the word "shibboleth," ancient Hebrew for either "ear of corn" or "stream." In the dialect of the Gileadites, the word was pronounced with a "shhhhhhh" sound, while the Ephraimites pronounced the word with a simple "s" sound. Apparently, thousands of folks said "Sibboleth" and got into some pretty deep sit yammering on about ears of corn to the sentries.

The example of the shibboleth points to what I mean when I say "occult rhetoric": it denotes the way in which human language is used to create inside and outside groups, as well as to do other things I'll speak about shortly.

The example of the shibboleth also helps me get at two important terms in my book's title: "the occult" and "rhetoric." I trust most of you are familiar with the meaning of "secrecy" and "mass media," so let me first discuss "rhetoric," then the "occult."

The term "rhetoric" is itself a kind of shibboleth when one recognizes the way it is used in the academic tradition is radically different than the way it is used by our politicians on television. Some of you may recall that the key lecture of the Fellowcraft degree urges the study of rhetoric as well as six other arts and sciences. Well, my academic field is rhetoric or rhetorical studies, and I can tell you us rhetoricians sometimes tire of people telling us that we study-dare I say it? bullsit. Us academic Gileadites often wish the popular media tribes would recognize the term in a very different sense: namely, that rhetoric denotes the serious study of persuasive speaking and writing, and the way in which human language and symbols effect human behavior and consciousness.

Now, let me turn to the more controversial term, "the occult." Despite whatever you hear in the mass media, the occult is not reducible to worshipping the devil. In fact, the occult tradition is much more noble than that, and can be traced back to the emergence of the natural and social sciences. The occult should be understood simply as the study of secrets both secular and divine. One of the things I do in the book is explain why secrecy is important and what its uses were in respect to the occult tradition: for starters, secrecy was called for by early scientists because open discussion of their researches could lead to state persecution. Eventually, as democracy spread across the west, this necessity of secrecy shifted from protection from state power to other functions. The most notable function of secrecy is familiar to everyone in this room: secret knowledge helps to engender social bonds among those in the know.

Regardless, the occult tradition concerns secrets about ultimate reality, and insofar as Masonry participates in the disclosure of symbols and allegories for intuiting divine truths, then it too participates, by virtue of secrecy, in the Western occult tradition.

As many of you probably recall upon your introduction to Masonry, many of its symbols are strange, weird, often confusing-and there is an awful lot of it. What my book tries to do is describe the function of strange and difficult language, how it works to help the aspirant to greater understandings of ultimate reality, and how it works to create groups of belonging.

Obviously I do not have time enough to explain how occult rhetoric works in any detail. Today I'd like to focus on one simple element: the role of the imagination and its relationship to publicity.

Masonry, like most occult orders, is esoteric in nature because symbolic signification is not strict, but imaginative and associative, a thought process that we can trace back to the dialectics of Plato. In the occult tradition, the use of one's imagination is, in fact, central.

To make this case, let me refer to a brief case study, the writings of the 19th century French magician and Freemason, Eliphas Lévi. In many ways Lévi's writings on magic mark the beginning of "modern occultism," a moment in the occult tradition that is characterized by a popular interest enabled by media technologies of mass production, as well as a general withering of the influence of religious prohibitions against the practice and study of occultism. Many scholars of the occult often locate the nineteenth century revival of popular interest in the occult with the publication of Lévi's occult books. What was significant about these books, and what many a curious reader undoubtedly found attractive, was Lévi's vivid writing style. As Elizabeth Butler noted, Lévi's books belong more truly to literature than to the science of the occult, for his poetic talents helped him to transform relatively dry books on the subject into something both radiant and sinister, transforming descriptions of ritual into something akin to a sensational novel. For example, Lévi describes the art of the Kabbalist as that which concerns the most astonishing formulae in the service of The Mother of God, within whom the Kabbalist realizes "all that is divine in the dreams of innocence, all that is adorable in the sacred enthusiasm of every maternal heart."

Given Lévi's creative and literary talents, it is not surprising that the imagination played an important role in his descriptions of the conduct of transcendental magic. The imagination, Lévi said, "is only the soul's inherent faculty of assimilating . . . images and reflections contained in the living light." Yet it is an extremely important capacity for the adept, whose imagination is "diaphanous, whilst that of the crowd is opaque." Lévi emphasized the importance of imagining magical symbols in the creation and use of talismans and sigils, as well as the significant role that mental images play in divination. Indeed, Lévi was fond of sprinkling his books with numerous illustrations and magically "charged" symbols. In fact, the imagined deity Lévi created to reside over the magical arts, the Sabbatic Goat, has long eclipsed Lévi's fame as the Magus who invented it (see handout).

Now, it is undeniable that Lévi's many books on the occult tradition were written for a popular audience, and this fact begins to explain why the occult tradition is increasingly associated with the dark arts. Lévi was writing in a time when paperback books and dime novels were beginning to appear. Tabliod newspapers were starting to proliferate, and journalism as we know it begin to emerge. In other words, the late nineteenth century witnessed the advent of what you and I would call "publicity." Imagine, if you will, the challenge publicity posed to occult organizations, especially the Masons: with the proliferation of the printing press, the threat of having one's cherished secrets "published" was increasing. The threat that mass publication posed to the Masons was, in fact, largely responsible for the Antimasonic movement in the United States in the 19th century; as some of you will recall, William Morgan was purportedly murdered because he threatened to publish the secrets of a Master Mason, thereby spawning a floodtide of resentment and so-called "Morgan Committees."

But back to France: insofar as the secrets of the occult tradition could be-and were-published on a wide scale, Lévi and other occultists, such as Albert Pike, began writing in an even more difficult style. Insofar as the general public were curious and wanting to read about occult secrets, Lévi started writing highly evocative and deliberately ironic treatises on the occult that spoke with a double tongue. In what is perhaps his most famous treatise, Transcendental Magic, Lévi decided to play an ironic joke that has plagued the occult tradition ever since: Knowledgeable of the legend of Faust, and certainly tired of the accusations that occultism was actually a demonic exercise, Lévi made up a ritual for conjuring the devil. Let me read a bit of this ritual to give you a sense of its patent ridiculousness:

Conditions of Success in Infernal Evocations

. . . . A fast of fifteen days must be observed, taking a single unsalted repast after sundown. It should consist of black bread and blood, seasoned with unsalted spices or black beans and milky narcotic herbs. We must get drunk every five days after sundown on wine in which five heads of black poppies and five ounces of pounded hemp-seed have been steeped for five hours, the infusion of being strained through a cloth woven by a prostitute . . . The evocation should be performed on the night between Monday and Tuesday, or that between Friday and Saturday. A solitary and forbidden spot must be chosen, such as a cemetery haunted by evil spirits, a place where some murder has been committed, or a druidic alter or an old temple of idols. A black seamless and sleeveless robe must be provided; a leaden cap emblazoned with the signs of the moon, Venus and Saturn; two candles of human fat set in black wooden candlesticks, carved in the shape of a crescent; . . . a copper vase containing the blood of the victim; . . . the blood of a goat, a mole and a bat; four nails taken from the coffin of an executed criminal; the head of a black cat which has been nourished on human flesh for five days; a bat drowned in blood; the horns of a goat . . . and the skull of a patricide. . . . .

The instructions continue for a considerable length. Now, it should be clear at this point the task that Lévi sets for the neophyte devil worshipper is tremendous! Lévi piles up an insurmountable number of ritual elements for evoking the devil that are, well, fairly ludicrous.

Lévi's misleading rhetoric here, however, is designed to do a number of things: first, it is designed to put off the curious dabbler; second, it is designed to amuse the reader who is "in the know." It is funny to imagine some fool trying to do this (and to our knowledge no one has). Yet more importantly, the clue that this is not to be taken seriously is the complex understanding of the forces of good and evil, the way in which most occultists believed human kind was an amalgum of the forces of good and evil that must be kept in balance.

As most occultists during this time period would argue, the forces of good and evil come from the same, supernatural SOURCE (indeed, some of the so-called higher degrees of Freemasonry continue this teaching), that good and evil are part of some ineffable divine plan that is beyond the human capacity to represent it. Hence, to distinguish between good and bad magic was to misunderstand the "nature" of magic. Were Lévi's remarks meant to be taken seriously, then? Nope. They were a deliberate, ironic blind. They were deliberately misleading.

Now, the problem with being deliberately misleading with remarks about the devil is that, with publicity, the non-occultist can take you seriously-and that's exactly what happened! In my book I attempt to show how the mischievous jokes of renowned occultists continued a Faustian legend of making deals with the devil that persists to this day. Countless occultists in the 20th century have been accused of being secret devil worshippers, which is in part the direct consequence of curiosity and the logics of publicity.

As you might imagine, the rumor that occultists-including Freemasons-worship the devil has contributed in part to the decline of interest in secret societies in the past century. In bringing my talk to a close, let me suggest another reason why: The occult tradition has declined in the twentieth century as a result of the failure to exercise the human imagination.

As Lévi argued, understanding complex symbolism requires the use of one's imagination. Indeed, we can trace Freemasonry back to the ancient Mysteries, which taught that reality is a series of dimensions or levels that the aspirant learned about through grades or degrees. One was asked to imagine, in his mind's eye, what moving through multiple realities must be like. Masonry makes similar demands on the candidate: the allegory and symbolism of Masonry is designed to stimulate the imagination of the candidate as he moves into increasing levels of awareness. Indeed, this is exactly the function of the temple of King Solomon, a imaginary device that can be traced back, again, to the ancient Greek device of imaginatively moving through space to memorize speeches and catechisms. In other words, not only is Solomon's temple symbolic, but it is also a mnemonic device-a stimulus to imagination and to memory. Insofar as Masonry is an esoteric tradition, one can understand why imaginative symbols are needed as mnemoic devices: without mental pictures, the catechism would be awfully difficult to memorize.

In our current world, we are asked less and less to imagine. Instead of using our minds eye to think through complex myth, allegory, and symbolism, we have the television screen and the movie theatre. This is especially the case among younger people, who read much less than previous generations and therefore lack the same capacity to envision new worlds in their heads. And why should they need to? Everything is image these days--everything imaginable has been created by the mass media dream factory, as if to render our capacity to imagine obsolete (as an aside, I would also argue it is in the interest of media capitalism to hijack the human imagination, but more about that perhaps later).

What I'm saying, then, is that the mass media have contributed to the decline of the occult tradition for two reasons: first, increasing publicity has led to a number of attempts to keep occult secrets secret-which has backfired. In our age of surveillance, web-cams, and "reality television," claming to have a secret can lead to undue scrutiny. This continues to be the case with the Freemason's, who are erroneously charged with the most preposterous motives, from running the New World Order to worshipping aliens from outer space.

Second, the mass media have contributed to the decline of the occult tradition because communication technologies have changed the way people think about and understand reality (viz., "epistemology"), and thereby altered our capacity to imagine. Insofar as the imagination is central to the occult tradition, it would make sense that Masonry and other allegorical and symbolic teachings are less and less appealing to young people AS modes of literacy change. In short, what many Mason's have said about the decline of the Fraternity among younger generations is true: if you want a reason for Masonry's decline, then you need look no further than your living room, which, for most of us, is the seat of human imagination today. We call it "television"